A Recent Historical Overview of the Development of Non-literary Genre Theory and the Evolution of the Field
of Speech Communication
Catherine Matsuo
＊Abstract
The end of the first decade of the 21st century is a good time to take stock of non-literary theories of genre which emerged in the North American discipline of Speech Communication in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper charts the major developments in genre theory, and especially the reconceptualization of genre as pragmatic action by Carolyn Miller (1984/1994), against the context of the evolution of its intellectual "home" of Speech Communication, which is now just one among many disciplines in what has become an expanded and diversified academic field of Communica- tions Studies. I note how globalization has increased the permeability of disciplinary borders, and argue that rhetorical theories of genre need to continue to integrate perspectives from other fields if they are to be able to explain the explosion of textual forms taking place not just in new, but also
＊Associate Proffessor, Faculty of Humanities, Fukuoka University
in old media; the influence of digital technology on communication; and the way communication using genres using English is being conducted by increasing numbers of multilingual Internet users.
The Development of Non-literary Genre Theory and the Evolu- tion of the Field of Speech Communication
Interest in non-literary genre theory had been growing in the North American field of Speech Communication in the 1960s and 70s, and culminated in a conference on the subject in Kansas in 1976, organized by the Research Board of the Speech Communication Association. Two years later, in an essay written in response to the conference deliberations, Campbell and Jamieson (1978) broke new ground when they claimed that genres could no longer be understood simply as acts in which clusters of particular rhetorical forms occur. They asserted that generic claims based solely on similarities of textual form were inadequate: genres had to be understood as a dynamic fusion of rhetorical forms and situation.
The full "sociocultural turn," however, was not made in Speech Communication until the 1980s, when the Quarterly Journal of Speech published what is now nearly always called Carolyn Miller's "seminal"
paper, Genre as Social Action (1984, reprinted in 1994). In this paper, Miller
reconceptualized genres as pragmatic acts ―"typified rhetorical actions
based in recurrent situations" (1984/1994, p. 31). In order to reconceptualize
genres as social action, and explain how the language forms in genres
perform action, Miller had to show how meaning-as-action derives from the
combination of language form and substance at different levels, from the lowest, micro-levels of language processing through speech acts, to the micro-macro nexus of genre (i.e. genres are created by the progressive fusion of form and substance at lower levels, and genres operate at the macro levels of context of form of life ―Wittgenstein's term― and culture).
Miller's innovation lay in her use of sociological and linguistic theories to explain how it is that words carry out action, thereby supporting and strengthening rhetorical theory by explaining and capturing what actually happens in rhetorical practice. To take us from human experience in the social world to how it is articulated in language, Miller combined Burke's (1950/1969a, p. 21) contention that substance comes from a culture's
"common sensations, concepts" with psycho-sociological (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973) and linguistic (Halliday, 1978) explanations of how society both structures, and is structured by, language. At the sentence level, Miller used speech act theory (Searle, 1969; 1975) to show how form and substance perform action (by causing uptake) at a particular level of context. By positing that speech acts are subject to further formalization at the higher levels of strategy and episode and then genre, Miller showed that form and substance "bear a hierarchical relationship to each other"
(1984/1994, p. 32) and that different texts operate at different levels of context. By showing, in fact, how form acts as "a kind of meta- information," guiding listeners as to how they should respond, Miller was also able to account socio-linguistically for Burke's rhetorical understand- ing of form as "an arousing and fulfillment of desires" (1931/1968, p. 124).
Miller's explanation of the active, intentional and socially structured
and situated nature of language made it untenable for Speech Communica-
tion analysts to continue making generic claims based only on similarities of textual forms. Miller's work was a watershed in Speech Communication, marking the transition from old to new rhetoric in the field:
１instead of the old stable-because-closed generic categories based solely on clusters of rhetorical forms, North American New Rhetoric theories of genre stressed the dynamic nature of genres and the necessity of understanding texts in their contexts.
Dissatisfaction with the lack of effectiveness of focusing solely on form was also being voiced in another quarter―the field of Composition Studies,
２which had emerged in the 1970s (see Nystrand, Greene and Wiemmelt, 1993). In the 1980s, as Coe, Lingard and Teslenko (2002) point out, work on genre focused on how genres persuade (i.e. the rhetorical influence was still strong), and with the purpose, in the field of Composi- tion Studies in the US, of teaching minority, "non-mainstream" students how to master the genres of power. Thus, partly due to Miller's influence, partly due to increased diversity in the US student body that required new understandings of writing and how to teach it, and partly in response to the changing realities of modern communication practices and the appear- ance of new technologies, Speech Communication was changing in the following ways:
１ Freedman and Medway (1994a, p. 8) note that genre studies evolved in a number of
"social formations." Berlin (1982) had already identified the existence of the "new rhetoricians" in Composition Studies. According to Berlin (1988), in Composition Studies, the new rhetoric fused classical rhetoric with cognitive theories of problem-solving and both cognitive and linguistic theories of creativity. Prior to this, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) had famously coined the term "new rhetoric" in their influential book on argumentation theory.
２ Historically, US departments of Rhetoric/Speech Communication have had close ties with Composition Studies and departments of English. To see how this relationship is being configured today, see Inside Higher Ed (2008).
●
The field expanded beyond old understandings of rhetoric and its uses, i.e. the analysis of grand public discourse (often from a literary or historical perspective); the evaluation of the achievements of famous speakers and writers; and training in public oratory. Its broadened remit entailed using a variety of theories to explain communication in all its forms, however "humble" (e.g. the memo) and all its media;
●
Socio-cultural perspectives became the new paradigm; texts were now understood in terms of, and in relation to, their contexts, and genres were interpreted in relation to their discourse communities;
３●
Language was now firmly understood not as representation but as action (words "do" things);
●
Analysis incorporated ethnographic perspectives; i.e. text-makers and text-users were consulted for their understandings of texts' functions in their workplaces or educational contexts;
●
The field continued to broaden its theoretical base to include, for example, social science and linguistic perspectives.
As for genre, it was in the 1990s that interest really took off. In 1992, another conference in North America, this time held in Canada, and entitled "Rethinking Genre" brought together scholars from different disciplines and different national traditions. The conference contributors drew heavily on Miller's (1984/1994) paper and another less famous, but
３ Discourse community is a contested term because the word "community" suggests a homogeneous group and ignores the tensions and conflicts which often arise in those groups; see Kent (1991) and Fairclough (1992) for detailed discussions.
nonetheless influential, paper by Australian Anne Freadman (1987, reprinted with additions in 1994). Freadman discussed genre from outside the prevailing paradigms of linguistics and sociology, drawing instead on semiotics and cultural theory, and emphasizing speech act theory. The edited volumes resulting from this 1992 conference, Freedman and Medway's Genre and the New Rhetoric (1994a) and Learning and Teaching Genre (1994b) represented the first thoroughgoing articulation of North American new rhetoric genre research and theory, and genre pedagogical theory. In the first chapter of Genre and the New Rhetoric, Freedman and Medway laid out the varied intellectual traditions that had fed into the reconceptualizations of genre in the new rhetoric, including: rhetoric (Kenneth Burke); social constructionism (Richard Rorty and Kenneth Bruffee); argumentation theory (Stephen Toulmin); cultural anthropology (Clifford Geertz); speech act theory (John Austin and John Searle);
dialogism and addressivity (Mikhail Bakhtin); and applied linguistics (John Swales).
Freedman and Medway (1994a) then went on to outline the differences and overlaps between the North American and the Australian Sydney School approaches to genre.
４The Sydney School approach is grounded in the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) work of Michael Halliday and Jim Martin.
５In brief, both traditions recognize the primacy of the social in
４
Hyon's (1996) paper distinguished among three schools of genre theory: North American New Rhetoric, the Australian SFL tradition and the British EAP school of John Swales. More than a decade on from Hyon's paper, when books on genre and first and second language writing tend to contain contributions from all three traditions, and when John Swales has moved to the US and exerts a strong influence on genre studies there, Hyon's distinctions are no longer so clear cut.
５
Knapp (1995) asserted that the "Sydney School" nomenclature was too broad a
understanding genre, but the Sydney School, because of its SFL origins, is much more concerned with the examination and detailed analysis of textual forms than the North Americans, who in the 1990s were instead emphasiz- ing the dynamism of genres and the evolution and decay of genres in response to their socio-cultural contexts. Also, the Sydney School was, and continues to be, more overtly political: their goal in researching and teaching genre is to effect social change. Thus, in the series editor's preface to Genre and the New Rhetoric, Australian Allan Luke broke the etiquette of the genre of the Senior Editor's Preface when, instead of praising, he criticized many of the essays in the book for their lack of political con- sciousness. He accused the North Americans of "freeze drying" genres in their use of descriptive accounts, arguing that such a methodology was not only reductive but risked obscuring "the dynamic cultural, economic and political forces vying for airspace and airtime, image and voice" (Luke, 1994, p. viii) in an era of speeded up capitalism and globalization.
Meanwhile, also in the 1990s, these very social forces, along with world events and technological developments were making themselves felt in the intellectual "home" of Speech Communication, the US Speech Communica- tion Association: in 1997, it changed its name to the National Communica- tion Association.
６The name change reflected a broadened understanding of
categorization of approaches to genre in Australia. He noted the existence of other approaches to genre (e.g. social process model) beyond the apparent hegemony of the Systemic Functional Linguistics-based genre approach. See also Freadman's (1987/1994) paper, above.
６
What is now the National Communication Association was founded in 1914 as the
National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking. In 1970 the
organization changed its name to the Speech Communication Association. While the
National Communication Association is the largest organization devoted to
communication studies in the US, with more than 8,000 members in over 20 countries,
the concept of communication; it also served as an umbrella term for what had become a bifurcated field of science-based and humanist approaches to the study of communication. In the US, communication is studied in various university departments and other groups, e.g. university depart- ments of Communication, Speech Communication, Mass Communication, Technical Communication, and groups such as Information Systems and Sciences, Library Science, Management and Organization Studies (Poole and Walther, 2001).
Nowadays, rhetoric is just one among many approaches for analyzing and understanding communication: the traditional Speech Communication rhetorical and discourse analysis models are still influential, but they exist alongside an expanded range of research methods, including both quantita- tive and qualitative methodologies from the social sciences, for example.
Often knowledge domains intersect: in humanist orientations to communi- cation, critical and cultural studies may have significant points of overlap with discourse studies and media studies and the knowledge bases of performance studies and public address scholarship (National Communica- tion Association, 2007).
As regards genre theory, since the mid-1990s, the "new rhetoric" has been striving towards a unified theory of genre; in pursuit of this goal, scholars have been looking to synthesize and integrate genre knowledge and research from various disciplines, including (principally) rhetoric, linguistics, composition studies, and writing for academic purposes. The
there are of course other bodies more directly concerned with the analysis of
discourse from a more purely rhetorical perspective, e.g. the Rhetoric Society of
America.
volume edited by Coe et al. (2002), represents a further expansion of the scope of genre theory and further attempts at synthesis: it brings together scholars from Australia, Canada, Norway, Russia and the US, and perspectives from British/US speech act theory, European and US semiotics, Russian activity theory, and Soviet genre theory.
Nonetheless, it is probably true to say that, as regards rhetorical perspectives on genre, the "core" theorists in North American university departments of Speech Communication today are the American philoso- pher, literary theorist and rhetorician Kenneth Burke (1897-1995), and the Russian literary theorist and philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin
７(1895-1975). Though with different emphases, both tackled questions which continue to preoccupy modern Speech Communication scholarship, questions such as the nature of mind and human action through the use of symbols, the relationship between language and ideology, issues of identity and identification in self/other relationships, the addressivity of language.
８Burke's influence in rhetorical approaches to Speech Communication is long-standing, and rests on his concepts of rhetorical situation and
７ Despite being contemporaries, Burke and Bakhtin were not familiar with each other's work because the Soviet Union was to all intents and purposes closed off to the West under Stalin's rule. Also, Bakhtin spent much of his life either internally exiled by the government or in self-imposed exile: he chose to live in remote areas to keep himself away from Stalin's attention and purges. Furthermore, even though Bakhtin wrote constantly throughout his life, his work was often not published.
８ The commonalities in the themes tackled by both Burke and Bakhtin (but from different theoretical perspectives) reflect the social, political and intellectual upheaval of the early 20thcentury. In the intellectual realm, the work of Freud, Marx and Einstein shattered old certainties about the nature of mind, the privileged and unified subject, the social order and the very laws of physics, and seemed to require, in response, new theories of knowledge, language and human action and identity.
identification (1950/1969a), his understanding of rhetoric as "symbolic inducement" through rhetorical form (form as "an arousing and fulfillment of desires;" 1931/1968; see above), and what is known as his (1945/1969b) dramatistic pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose), a method of analysis for uncovering motivation in symbolic action (see also Herrick, 2008).
Bakhtin's influence on Speech Communication dates only to the 1980s, when his biography and a slew of translations and commentaries were published in English.
９Broadly speaking, Bakhtin's importance
10for communication analysts lies in his emphasis of the social, ideological and value-laden nature of speech communication, and his insistence that language does not only reflect, but constructs the social world. (It is important to note that when Bakhtin uses the term speech communication, he is not referring to an academic discipline, but to communication as it takes place in and through utterances, both spoken and written.)
９ Bakhtin's influence on Western literary theory dates from the mid to late 1960s, but his work on non-literary genre was not published in English until 1986.
Therefore, Miller's seminal work in Speech Communication (1984/1994) does not refer to Bakhtin. Nonetheless, there are important similarities between her 1984 explication of form as "meta-information" which disposes listeners in certain ways, and the second and third elements of Bakhtin's formulation of speech genres, namely, his conception of style in generic utterances as the expression of the individual's "speech plan" or "speech will" and their generic (intersubjectively understood and "agreed") forms of finalization.
10 Coe et al. (2002, p. 4) interpret the current vogue of Bakhtin in terms of theory's
"shift from structuralism to poststructuralism." Bakhtin himself had an aversion to definitions and "isms", because to define is to finalize. For Bakhtin, existence, individuals and cultures are always in a state of becoming: they cannot be finalized.
Of course, if thinking and schools of thought are, at some level, responses, however unconscious, to changes in social realities, then they are historical phenomena.
Because of this historicity, and/or because academics want to appropriate thinkers in support of their own causes, Bakhtin, like anyone else, probably cannot escape categorization.
Regarding genre theory in particular, Bakhtin's contributions include:
his identification of the utterance as the basic unit of speech communication as opposed to the sentence; his desire for a unified basis for the classifica- tion of utterances and their types (i.e. speech genres); his emphasis on the historicity of genres; the creativity and freedom of the individual in the use of genres; the centripetal and centrifugal forces of language; and the active role of the listener-participant in speech communication.
Finally, it is necessary to note the effect of globalization on the increasing permeability of Speech Communication's theoretical and methodological borders. In part, Speech Communication's emphasis on the dialectic between text and context, genre and culture, genre and discourse community, reflects a larger tendency in the spirit of the age towards self-consciousness and reflexivity of mind, at least as regards the West. On another level, Speech Communication not only welcomes new ideas to improve theory but even depends on them for academic and institutional survival. Injecting new blood in the form of new thinking from new, or newly discovered thinkers such as Bakhtin (around whom Holquist, 2002, p.
184, wryly notes, a "Bakhtin industry" has grown up) helps to keep communication studies current, relevant and, importantly, funded.
11But fundamentally, of course, Speech Communication is changing because it has to explain human communication, and how it is transform- ing in the age of globalization. Globalization occurred alongside, and was
11 Miller herself (1996) wrote a White Paper for her Dean entitled:
Communication in
the 21
stCentury: The Original Liberal Art in an Age of Science and Technology. In
this paper, she cites, among others, then US Secretary of Labor under President
Clinton, Robert Reich, to show her university that communication studies are more
vital to US society than ever.
speeded up by, the popularization of the World Wide Web and the Internet.
This technology is changing the way more and more people communicate around the globe. Furthermore, computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies such as e-mail and social-networking are blurring the boundaries between spoken and written language.
As regards genre, genre hybridization, evolution and transformation are occurring more rapidly and more radically than ever, not just on the Internet, but in all media, while new genres that are unique to the web are emerging. Traditional Speech Communication approaches to genre (i.e.
rhetoric influenced), with their emphasis on "idealized" genre, i.e. close reading of successful "ideal" text types (Miller and Shepherd, 2004), and their roots in the written word inscribed on paper, must continue to evolve if rhetorical perspectives are to be able to offer adequate explanations of the blurred, hybridized and digital genres of the very fast-moving 21st century world.
Rhetorical, sociocultural interpretive approaches give us rich under- standings of the context in which genres are produced, and agents' motivations in producing them. However, in this increasingly connected world, where the number of Internet users has topped the 1.5 billion mark,
12"ideal" and "psychological" perspectives and models based on monolingual North American cultural norms may be poor predictors of textual expectations and terms of success as regards texts created by multilingual Internet users living far apart physically, but connected electronically. Furthermore, interpretive approaches based on a few texts
12This figure is for the end of December, 2008.
Source: Internet World Stats, March,
2009, http://internetworldstats.com/stats/htm; retrieved March 16, 2009.
are limited in what they can tell us what is actually going on in communi- cation right now among huge numbers of multilingual Internet users using English. For such information, at present, we need to turn to large sample empirical analyses.
The English-only bias of CMC analysis in the West has begun to be addressed (see Danet and Herring, 2007) and genres are proving to be a popular unit of analysis as regards both English and other languages.
Mixed methodology studies and corpus-based analyses are uncovering where and how, in multilingual contexts, code-switching takes place, which genres are being used using English by multilingual speakers around the world (e.g. Androutsopoulos, 2007); and what the linguistic and discourse features of these genres are (Wodak and Wright, 2007).
Globalization has not only connected people around the globe through the Internet; it has resulted in greater movement physically around the globe. Scholars increasingly routinely travel to conferences far from their home bases, and universities increasingly draw their staff from different parts of the world. This has resulted in further cross-pollination of ideas among disciplines and the realization, often, that differently named disciplines have much in common, e.g. now that Speech Communication draws on sociocultural perspectives, it looks a lot like Discourse Analysis in the UK. As Speech Communication evolves to explain digital genres, it may find itself drawing increasingly on multimodal analytic approaches developed from genre analysis in SFL (see Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996;
2001), or approaches in Information Sciences.
As regards genre theory in particular, the movement of scholars has
meant that Australian SFL perspectives on genre are increasingly well-
known in North America and vice versa: Australia held its first conference on the New Rhetoric in 2005, and its plenary speakers were both American.
US rhetorician Carolyn Miller has presented at conferences in the UK, Brazil and Norway within the last five years. British EAP genre specialist, John Swales, has moved to the US, and now works in the University of Michigan, where he is Professor of Linguistics. He is also co-director of the Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English, and very influential in promoting corpus-based approaches to the understanding and teaching of genre in US universities. To repeat: the tendency in genre theory is towards synthesis and integration of perspectives. Thus, whereas in 1994, Freedman and Medway could say that the North American and Australian theories of genre "seemed to have evolved largely independently of each other" (1994a, p. 9), only eight years later, five of the contributors to Coe et al.'s (2002) volume are Australian, and are integrating the ideas of American and Australian approaches in their work (e.g. Fuller and Lee, 2002).
If anything, the concept of genre is only becoming more relevant in the digital age, as the increasing cross-pollination of ideas among disciplines shows. The annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) includes sessions on genre theory under the rubric Genre in Digital Documents, where the concept of genre is used to understand how genres evolve as they move from old to new media; how digital genres emerge and work; and importantly, what prospects the concept of genre holds for improving web searches.
Genre is also an important concept in Organizational Communication
Studies, and the convergence of different theoretical orientations under the
rubric of genre studies is further attested to by the presence of MIT
scholars such as Wanda Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates (respectively, Chair of Communication Sciences and Sloan Distinguished Professor of Manage- ment) at both the Hawaii System Sciences conferences and in rhetoric-based accounts of genre (e.g. Yates and Orlikowski, 2002, in Coe et al., ibid).
In the area of pedagogy, the teaching of writing using the digital genres of Web 2.0 technologies is increasingly represented at the annual US College Composition and Communication and TESOL conferences.
There is evidence, too, that Rhetoric/Speech Communication perspec- tives are evolving to meet the challenge of explaining digital communica- tion (see also above). A recent volume by Clay Spinuzzi (2003), an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Texas, Austin, uses the notion of genre to analyze information design from a socio-cultural perspective.
Taking genre as his unit of analysis, and blending it with activity theory, Spinuzzi shows how workers improvise and innovate to make official genres and databases more responsive to their own needs and the realities of their workplace. Spinuzzi analyzes the workers' perspective, and presents them not as victims but as capable agents. The insistence on individual agency is, of course, the hallmark of rhetoric; surely, then, rhetoric is as relevant today as it has been formerly.
13Finally, the concept of genre from a Hallidayan SFL perspective has
13 Given the modern tendency to speak of rhetoric in a pejorative way as empty, fine-sounding words, trickery, or something rarified and inapplicable to the real world, it is useful to remember that rhetoric's roots are egalitarian. Rhetoric as a discipline was born in Sicily 2,500 years ago, when teachers of public speaking began to teach citizens whose land had been grabbed how to speak in public in order to persuade jurors to direct the authorities to return their land to them. The egalitarian principle in rhetoric lay in the assumption that everyone could be taught how to speak persuasively.
